On Tue, Mar 22, 2011 at 11:28 PM, Ian Hickson <ian@hixie.ch> wrote:
> On Wed, 23 Mar 2011, Sean Hayes wrote:
>>
>> Since it is marked as destined for a CSS editor, it seems that at least
>> in the past this idea of "fix at time of layout and avoid overlaps" was
>> deemed to be in scope for CSS.
>
> Where in the platform it is specified seems irrelevant to the technical
> aspects of what it says.
>
>
>> There is no indication that A and C are from different caption sources
>
> They're not, they're just overlapping cues from the same source. The setup
> I describe is very common in anime subtitling and is one of the commen
> forms of karaoke display.
>
>
> (FWIW, it would also make sense to support scrolling cues in this kind of
> scenario -- in fact this is the style prevailing in US TV captioning
> systems -- but the same arguments against your proposal apply with that
> kind of overlap-handling too.)
For the record: I think when cues overlap in time and are on the same
track, they should be scrolled in from the bottom. That's what roll-up
captions do and it's also the natural reading-direction of users.
I agree, I have seen it done differently for Karaoke, but not all
Karaoke works that way and not everyone agrees that it's a good user
experience. In fact, most people get confused by it the first time
they see that happen (I speak from anecdotal personal experience
here).
An alternative approach to scrolling - if we want to avoid overlapping
- would be to replace the captions that are there with the new ones.
That's in fact what pop-up captions do - there is no time overlap in
pop-up captions and therefore no movement. But I would leave this
functionality to the authors, who need to decide whether they want
scrolling (and therefore time-overlap) or not (and therefore cannot
have time-overlap).
Cheers,
Silvia.